How Gratitude Helps High Achievers Escape The Achievement Treadmill
How to Appreciate What You Have Without Losing the Drive for What Comes Next
There’s a quiet trap that catches a lot of ambitious people. You hit the goal you’ve been chasing, feel good about it for a moment, and then your attention slides to what’s next. The bigger role. The next round. The next milestone. Some version of your life that’s just slightly better than this one.
Psychologists have a name for the pattern. The hedonic treadmill, first described by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, is our tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness shortly after any positive event. That rush you feel when something goes well fades faster than you’d guess. There’s a related concept called the Better-Than-Now Bias, drawn from a set of studies in Psychological Science. When people were asked to imagine how their lives could be different, they consistently imagined lives that were better. Across eight separate studies, participants kept constructing upward comparisons, quietly overlooking whatever progress they had already made.
Together, those are the mechanics of the treadmill. The gap between where you are and where you think you should be stays open, because the target keeps moving.
Ambition itself is useful. That drive is often what makes high achievers good at what they do. The trouble starts when ambition operates without a counterweight. Success stops feeling like success while wins stop landing. You look up one day and realize you’ve built something impressive, and you barely feel it.
Does Gratitude Make You Less Ambitious?
Gratitude and ambition do not have to be opposites. Gratitude directs attention toward what is already meaningful or valuable; ambition directs attention toward what we still want to create. The problem arises when future-focused striving becomes so dominant that today's progress never fully registers.
The goal isn't to want less. It's to become capable of holding two truths at once: “I appreciate what I have built” and “I still care about what comes next.”
Gratitude is that counterweight, though I want to be careful how I frame it, because the word carries a soft, self-help reputation that undersells what it actually does. Gratitude is a practice of noticing more. It trains your attention on what’s already true and good in the life you’re building, while you keep working toward what’s next.
Gratitude does not require being grateful for everything that happens. You can be angry about a setback, disappointed by an outcome, or grieving a loss while still noticing what remains meaningful or supportive around you.
The research is stronger than most people realize. In a landmark study by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, participants who kept weekly gratitude journals reported more optimism, exercised more, and felt better about their lives overall. Other studies link regular practice to better sleep, lower stress, and higher life satisfaction. Sonja Lyubomirsky tested six different gratitude activities across nearly a thousand adults, and one clearly outperformed the rest: writing a letter to someone you’re grateful for, even if you never send it. A real letter, with specificity, addressed to a person who gave you something. The depth is what makes it stick.
That tracks with my own experience. A few years ago, I was staring down my tenth surgery, this one to repair a torn meniscus. I remember waking up a few days before and crying at the unfairness of another long recovery. Once I moved through the anger and accepted what was coming, I decided to launch a thirty-day public gratitude challenge, starting the day of my surgery. Every day, I posted something I was thankful for. Committing publicly changed the exercise entirely. Knowing I had committed to naming something each day changed what I paid attention to. I began noticing moments, people, and experiences that I might otherwise have passed over. By the end of the month, I was seeing my life differently.
For anyone leading a team, this scales. Psychologists use the term capitalization to describe what happens when we share good news with someone who responds with genuine enthusiasm. Research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that couples who did this consistently felt closer and more satisfied. The same effect shows up at work. In one study, employees who received a simple thank-you from their manager felt more competent, more appreciated, and were more willing to help again.
If you’ve been on the treadmill a while, a few questions tend to break the spell.
What’s genuinely good about your current chapter that you would have been grateful for five years ago?
Whose support have you left unacknowledged, even to yourself?
If you sat down tonight to write that person a letter, what would you want them to know?
And what would it look like to keep chasing what matters to you while letting this win count on its own terms?
Getting off the treadmill is about letting the life you’re already building register, while you keep building it.
A 5-Minute Achievement-Treadmill Reset
1. Look backward before looking forward.
What do you have today that you were once working toward?
2. Name one thing you don't want to normalize.
A relationship, opportunity, capability, milestone, or ordinary part of life you would genuinely miss.
3. Name who helped make it possible.
Ambition often focuses attention on individual effort; gratitude reminds us where support entered the story.
4. Tell someone.
Expressing gratitude can strengthen the recipient's sense of social value and can increase subsequent prosocial behavior.
5. Then decide what comes next.
Gratitude isn't the end of ambition. Return to the next goal after allowing the current chapter to register.
Note: Adapted and expanded from an article originally published on Forbes on August 12, 2026. This version includes practical steps for feeling and expressing gratitude.
1. Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society,” in Adaptation-Level Theory, ed. M. H. Appley (Academic Press, 1971): 287–305.
2. Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (Avery, December 31, 2013).
3. Fred B. Bryand and Joseph Veroff, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience (Psychology Press, 2007).
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ABOUT PARUL SOMANI
Parul Somani is a decision strategist, keynote speaker, and #1 Amazon bestselling author of The Path of Least Regret. A graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School, she combines behavioral science, strategic decision-making, and lived experience to help leaders navigate uncertainty and make values-aligned choices with greater clarity and confidence. Her work has been featured by Forbes, NPR, Inc., Oprah Daily, and Psychology Today.
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